18 February 2008 in Business, Mindscape | Comments enabled

It’s hard to believe that Mindscape has been trading for a year today! It feels like just yesterday we were setting up the office, stocking the fridge with coke and ordering chairs (which incidentally arrived about a week after the desks!). I thought I’d make a post about my views on the year that has passed.

Rod recently mentioned that he was pleased to see Xero generating export income in the first 12 months and I’m pleased to say that we also managed to make export income quickly as well (around the six month mark). It’s great to know that you’re helping the wider economy by bringing more money in.

We launched two products to market, LightSpeed and the WPF PropertyGrid. LightSpeed has had two subsequent releases and is at version 1.2. We’ve received a heap of positive feedback from users who are super impressed with the performance and ease of use. The buzz that you get from building, shipping and then getting positive feedback is second to none!

We grew our team, Ivan Towlson came on board and has added significantly to our ability to develop new products – his contributions have been impressive.The Summer of Code came along so we took the opportunity to have a student work with us for the summer. Mat has been working on various research pieces for us.

Of course we haven’t done this all alone. We knew right off that bat that we needed to surround ourselves with fantastic advisers and supporters. I’d like to comment on two of them in particular:

Rowan Simpson
Rowan has been an adviser to us for about six months and has provided a lot of great advice that has helped up grow and evolve. It’s certainly hard to see the forest for the trees when you’re working in a business and Rowan often provides the 10, 000 foot view that helps clarify situations. The thing that stuck me early on is just how passionate Rowan is about business and technology – the amount of time he invests in learning about anything relating to these areas is impressive and that knowledge had helped us immensely.

James Martin
James was at Bell Gully when we were looking for our first office space. Things tend to move pretty quickly when you find a place you like so we called up BG and got put through to James who invited us in to have a chat. We covered off on what we had to do and he was very professional. We have since built a fantastic relationship with James – he’s honest, friendly and always has time for us despite our size compared to the organisations he normally deals with. James has since moved from BG to Kensington Swan and while he specialises in property, I would recommend him to anybody in business.

There are, of course, many other people who have helped us get to the end of year 1, too many to list.

Year 1 is down, now it’s time to tackle year 2!

– JD